Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Fun Found Image

Too easy, maybe.

Yeah so..

I've been looking at a lot of images lately and I stumbled across this page documenting images from a book that my animation teacher once showed me in college. I have been trying to get a copy ever since then, but the book is out of print. So once again, thank you, intarweb. Enjoy. These are quite amazing. As the legend goes, these stereographic images were discovered along with the original 3-d pieces in an abandoned flat in France that was about to be demolished.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Cicada Molting


Click for an animated sequence of a cicada happily molting on a roll of paper towels.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Alt.history wins the nebula

Lady and Gents: Here's the winner of the 2008 Nebula Award for best novel--Michael Chabon's, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Pretty spectacular title, really. More importantly, nice cover. Mostly ref'ed here for Panic, as it's one of them alternate history novels. 

What's pretty cool, is that a lot of the nominated works this year can be found online. For free! (I just read Nancy Kress' Fountain of Age--good, but not as awesome as her Sleepless books. Also reminded me a bit of Verner Vinge's Rainbows End [Which is excellent. Just read it, dammit. Best forward thinkerer, evar.]). 

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Thunderbirds come to life!

Anybody watch Thunderbirds as a kid? Maybe Kim Jong-il did too.

North Korean military engineers are completing an underground runway beneath a mountain that can protect fighter aircraft from attack until they take off at high speed through the mouth of a tunnel.... The project was identified by an air force defector from North Korea and captured on a satellite image by Google Earth, according to reports in the South Korean press last week. .... The
runway, reminiscent of the Thunderbirds television series, highlights
the strange and secretive nature of the regime that provided the expertise for a partially built nuclear reactor in Syria, film of which was released by the CIA last week.

Friday, April 25, 2008

The true point behind "Earth Day"

Here is a well written piece to keep "environmentalism" and the whole Earth Day thing in perspective.

The idea in a nutshell: Over the past 4.5 billion years the Earth has dealt with catastrophes of over 90% extinction rates and recovered––even if we tried, nothing modern civilization could do to the environment could compare. If we screw up now, in a few million years there will be thousands of new species around to fill the niches of anything we regretfully take with us on our way out, and there will still be about 5 billion years left for worse things to happen and recover from before sun goes nova and swallows the planet in a big ball of fire.

The one thing that won't recover when we screw up, is us. So the point of environmentalism isn't about saving the Earth at all. The Earth will do just fine; the climate will recover, whales will be replaced by these guys. The point of environmentalism is self preservation. Modern human civilization needs the environment and it's resources to be stable in order to survive. We ruin it, we die. That's a pretty epic fail. Seems simple enough, but we sometimes lose sight of this or think environmentalism is more about keeping the Earth looking pretty and feeling good about ourselves as we save whales. That's clearly the wrong attitude, because khargras will be more fun, anyway. But we must do what we can to survive long enough to enjoy them.


And here's another post he did about how D&D got him his job!

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

!!!

Lookie here Fugu!

Earth Day, baby.

Argument #31 with "going green" is that one of the best ways to make an impact is to write to your congressman, call up a senator, etc. The problem is that there's a much higher potential of sounding like a complete jackass if you don't know what you're talking about when trying to change legislation than compared to just buying a CFL or two, so people don't do it (not to mentioned being labeled as an activist. Fucking hippies.). For example, here's how my phone call went:

Man on phone: Hello? This is the President.
Fugu: Hi! I'm calling on be-
Man on phone: FUCK YOU, FUCKING HIPPIE! I'd rather dry hump a rhino than give to your organization!

Since today is Earth Day, the first thing I did when I got up this morning is run to the Internet to see what Google did to their logo. It's green! Unfortunately, the only listed Hawaii event at the ED website (not the erectile dysfunction site, that's different) is to clean up the Ala Wai. There was also that Kokua Festival, but considering the smell as we drove by the second night it may have had more to do with 420 for some of the participants than Earth Day.

What are you going to do today for Earth Day? Me, I'm going start off the day by murdering the rooster that woke me up before 6am this morning. Then I'm going use it for a bacon-wrapped coq au vin in a brandy reduction sauce. Apparently the Internet says a pinot noir is a good pairing for coq au vin, but that's fucking retarded so I'll use a boxed white instead. I may also make some cranberry-chocolate tarts for desert. Happy Earth Day!

What happens

when all of the final cylons are revealed!

Sunday, April 20, 2008

Tokyo done up in Lego


A "Lego theme park" in Japan has created a Lego version of Shibuya station, one of Tokyo's most famous train depots. It also includes what looks like one half of Shibuya crossing, the intersection a lot of media use to show the chaotic energy of Tokyo. (They didn't include enough people, though, judging by the photo on the right. Shibuya crossing often has many, many more people.)
Never knew there was a Lego theme park in Japan... Not only that, it apparently includes a Lego Star Wars store!

Um...

win

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Noteworthy stuff to note

Just a few things I came across while cleaning out saved browser tabs (yeah, that's right):

Big list of scifi. Truly the most useful thing to come out of iO9, but unfortunately they also feel the need to write about scifi porn all the time. While I feel I should applaud this, it really limits their audience and it's getting freaking annoying.

An example of the kind of thing we should be working on right now. But better.

More lego. Some we've seen before, but I love that someone decided to build a model of those giant excavator things. Plus, it's got all of the steampunk Star Wars stuff. Plus I get to add the lego tag.

And finally, geeks partying it out! It's like burning man for non-hippies. I actually did an internship there (Ames) a long, long time ago, and I'm pretty sure I peed behind that building in the 4th image. So this looks like another tradition that's completely been absorbed by internet culture (e.g., booths for Instructables, Spore...).  Not that this is a bad thing, but I wonder if it's actually the same dozen people going to these events over and over again wearing different wigs, and the rest of the net just assumes we're participating by proxy in a wider world, but really, it's just them.

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Friday, April 11, 2008

An Open Letter to Kentucky Fried Chicken Hawaii


Dear idiots--

I'll get right to it. How is it possible that you jackasses don't sell musubi? I mean, are you fucking crazy? (For those of you on foreign shores, musubi (also called 'onigiri', apparently) are simple rice balls, wrapped in seaweed so you can hold the things in your hand. They're of Japanese origin, but a pretty ubiquitous starch delivery system in Hawaii.) Yeah, so like I was saying; are you guys fucking crazy? All the other fast food joints are busting blood vessels in their brain praying to Jesus that you don't think of this simple, simple idea. I mean, McDonalds has had saimin forever, and Burger King sells SPAM, for fuck's sake. And those ideas are stupid, and pandering, and only interesting in the slightest because the rest of the world thinks SPAM is gross. Original Recipe and Rice Balls is fire from the skies, raining down on the heads of your enemies. Think of how easy this would be to do, and how instead you're wasting your time (and mine) cramming random clippings from your menu into fucking bowls. Come on. YOU ARE NOT TACO BELL. STOP ACTING LIKE FUCKING TACO BELL. I digress. Do this musubi thing, and you'll need to build a second drive-through lane (possibly a third). Do this musubi thing and you guys would have so much goddamned money you could all drive fifty-foot magic spaceships. You know I'm right. Fucking hurry.

Sincerely yours,
Mr. Pony


Tuesday, April 1, 2008

flOw


Another PSP game that caught my eye-barring the Enya-like soundtrack. You're a thing that swims around and tries to eat other things.

What?


Kitten War